Please help us to prove that open-access anthropology can work!

In making Cultural Anthropology free to read, we have given up our most significant source of revenue. We need your help to ensure the financial viability of the journal into the future. Please consider making a donation, big or small, to our publishing fund. And if you aren't a member of the SCA, please think about joining.

Tracking Properness: Repackaging Culture in a Remote Australian Town

by Kimberly Christen

Abstract

Indigenous people around the world have used the contemporary convergence of a global tourist market, increasingly available recording technologies, and ambivalent national desires for reconciliation to repackage their traditional cultural knowledge. This article examines the production and circulation of an internationally available compact disc containing Warumungu women’s dreaming songs. Tracking its production, circulation, and ongoing insertion into cultural negotiations, I explore the contours of cultural change through simultaneously commercial and traditional practices. In a nation that claims self-determination for its Aboriginal population, Australian national sentiments and Aboriginal cultural mandates are not separate. Recent land rights movements, political moves for cultural autonomy, and continuing political marginalization are not just the backdrop for the compact disc’s production but part of the impetus for its existence. As Warumungu women consciously repackaged their ancestral song tracks into the compact disc’s tracks, they did so in ways that connect their abiding traditions and their uncertain future through “proper” (jurrkkul) cultural actions.

About the Author

Kimberly Christen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies and Director of Digital Projects at the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies at Washington State University. Dr. Christen received her PhD from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz in 2004, and her work explores the intersections of cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, intellectual property rights, the ethics of openness, and the use of digital technologies in and by indigenous communities globally. Her fieldwork and collaboration with the Warumungu community spanned ten years and produced new ways of sharing cultural heritage online (see links below). Dr. Christen is currently conducting fieldwork with the Plateau Tribes in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

Warumungu Links

Digital Dynamics Across Cultures: Christen worked with the Warumungu to develop this "interactive project focusing on the cultural protocols of the Warumungu people from Central Australia."

Mukurtu Protocol: Developing a digital storehouse for Warumungu cultural materials, Christen innovated a CMS (content management system) that can be used by other communities as a dynamic archival system.

The Song Peoples Sessions: This website presents recordings that are "collaboration[s] between traditional and contemporary AustralianIndigenous musicians to support the protection of intangible culturalheritage and maintenance of Indigenous languages and traditional songcycles, creating new forms of musical cultural expression." The sessions are an example of the kind of ongoing negotiation between modernity and tradition that Christen explores as "properness" in the article. As she wrote, the Warumungu use of the term properness pushed her to think of it "as a type of continuity, as a continually reworked set of actions that align with, but do not necessarily reproduce, an ideal notion of the past."

Questions for Classroom Discussion

1. Do you work with a community that has a wealth of materials that could be shared online? What are some benefits and drawbacks of sharing a group's meaningful materials with a wider audience unfamiliar with those meanings?

2. In the article, Christen notes that, "the compact disc is an object that seems to bridge many divides." Have you encountered phenomena that similarly connect different situations?

This article has been included in Cultural Anthropology's Curated Collection on Infrastructure